Utopia, you are standing in it!

Western Europe’s wind drought has them scrambling for fossil fuels, like their lives depend upon it, and it’s as if they didn’t see it coming! Who would ever have thought that the wind might stop blowing for extended spells?

The almost dystopian panic brings to mind George Miller’s dystopian post-Apocalypse action-thriller, Mad Max 2.

Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky – aka the Road Warrior – is an ex-cop, outcast and loner who had been roaming the wastelands for years, until he stumbles upon the desert compound and refuge of a clan of misfits and renegades (the Settlers), defending themselves against a marauding mob of cutthroats, led by the evil Lord Humungus (the Marauders).

Max manages to enter the compound and escape Humungus and his band of vicious thugs, for a time.

Max is already alive to the fact that the compound houses a petrol refinery and also, apparently, holds fuel…

A not-too-distant dystopia

I often tell my students the worst career choice they can make is one where they are not inspired by their professional activity and unable to follow their passions. Then it becomes just a job for some extrinsic worth (eg, paying the rent). This is how European farmers must be feeling when activist fear campaigns have led to political and market pressure to produce more organic food. They don’t believe that organic is safer, they see the lower yields, increased infestations and a poverty of options. They would be forced to switch to growing organic to simply try to pay the rent. Unlike the organic activist farmers who loudly and proudly believe they are changing the world by bringing their cult beliefs into the cultivation process (with each horn they lovingly fill with dung), the conventional farmer, forced by market forces to switch to organic, is merely…

Anyone familiar with the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy is aware of the flaws in his character and life story. These elements of his biography have been fully explored in studies like David Nasaw’s THE PATRIARCH: THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TURBULENT TIMES OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, Richard J. Whalen’s THE FOUNDING FATHER: THE STORY OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s THE FITZGERALDS AND THE KENNEDYS: AN AMERICAN SAGA. Kennedy’s life story is punctuated with “serial philandering,” a relationship with organized crime, his years as a Wall Street operator highlighted by repeated insider trading, lobotomizing his daughter Rosemary, an appeaser’s isolationist view of the world that led to his opposition to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall plan, a cozy relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, and a world view that saw fascism as a means of overcoming a…

The ninth plague of Egypt was complete darkness that lasted for three days. But in 536 A.D., much of the world went dark for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures to drop, crops to fail and people to die. It was, you might say, the literal Dark Age.

Now, researchers have discovered one of the main sources of that fog, as Becky LIttle and Brian Fuggle report. The team reported in Antiquity that a volcanic eruption in Iceland in early 536 helped spread ash across the Northern Hemisphere, creating the fog. Like the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption—the deadliest volcanic eruption on record—this eruption was big enough to alter global climate patterns, causing years of famine.

What exactly did the first 18 months of darkness look like? The Byzantine…